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Carl Stone is one of the pioneers of live computer music, and has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best composers living in (the USA) today.” He has used computers in live performance since 1986. Stone was born in Los Angeles and now divides his time between San Francisco and Japan. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East.

Stone has won numerous awards for his compositions and is the receipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. He has been commissioned for the creation of new works by many organizations and individuals including the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, NTT/Japan’s IC95 Festival, and many more. In 2001, Stone served as Artist-in-Residence at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in Japan, and in that same year he joined the faculty of Chukyo University’s School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences. Carl Stone’s music has also collaborated with many musicians including Otomo Yoshihide, Yuji Takahashi, Sarah Cahill, Dorit Cypis, Stelarc, Michiko Akao, z’ev, and Kathleen Rogers.

Stone will perform Guelaguetza, a work for electronic digital sound and images originally commissioned in 1996 by the (San Francisco) Bay Area Composers Forum. While many of Stone’s shorter works focus on sounds drawn from a single work or genre, in Guelaguetza, Stone has created a kaleidoscopic montage of digital samples from many disparate sources. The work shifts seamlessly from sections in which dozens of short digital samples are rhythmically layered and sequenced in a dense web of sonic references to sections in which deal with a single artist or work in more depth. When the work was premiered, the visual aspect of Guelaguetza was a series of static photographic images. The piece has recently been revamped and the images will now be dynamically transformed through a variety of digital manipulations that parallel many of Stone’s signature audio processing techniques.

About the Performance Series

The Austin Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to engage the public and artists in the creation, understanding, and appreciation of digital art. The Performance Series is focused on presenting experimental music and digital performance art in a contemplative setting. More info →